Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to a great 2016 for all of us! As we begin 2016 I thought you might enjoy a few words about our staff, since no year at the Chamber can ever happen without their dedicated work

Did you know that the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce employs eight full time staff? And those eight folks support five Community Chambers (each with their own Board, full set of meetings and events), PROPEL (our young professionals Board, also very active), along with our Regional Chamber’s Presidents’ Council and full Regional Board of Directors.

In addition to all the networking events, board meetings and educational programs these eight boards generate, Chamber staff provide financial, communication, programming and marketing, membership and administrative support to all our boards and our 1,300 members. So who’s doing all this work?

Nicole Niemi is our Customer Service Representative. If you call our front desk you’ll be talking to Nicole, who also prints up your event name tags, helps with our data base and keeps us all in line!

Gay Snook is our Bookkeeper and Office Manager. If you’ve ever come to a meeting and had something to eat, or submitted a bill to us, or needed anything fixed around the office, you’ve been supported by Gay. Gay also provides bookkeeping to our Community partners and PROPEL, in addition to keeping the Regional financials in order.

Ann Lebel is our Community Chamber Liaison, taking care of those five Community Chamber Boards I mentioned. Board meetings, events and special support – Ann takes care of everything for our Community Chamber partners.

Joe Pickering is our Director of Membership and Sales, heading up our efforts to bring in new members and keep our existing ones. Joe is always on the lookout for new Chamber opportunities. And if you have a new member prospect make sure you call Joe!

Nora Kreisler is our Membership & Sales Coordinator, working closely with Joe Pickering to support membership retention and growth. Joe does our outside work, and Nora is the heart of our inside membership efforts.

Chandra Leister is our Director of Programming and Marketing. Chandra runs Eggs & Issues, all our Regional Chamber events, and heads up our communications and marketing efforts. She also works with all our partners to make sure our branding and marketing are consistent and accurately reflect all we do. Did I mention social media? Chandra is our strategic director in that area too.

Ben Bulkeley is our Communication and Event Coordinator. Ben is also our newest employee, joining us at the beginning of December. He’s working with Chandra to implement member communications, programming publicity, social media and event support. Like the rest of us, Ben supports our partners as well as our members all across the line.

So that’s our team, and I’m always amazed by how much they do together to support 1300 members, seven Boards and well over 100 events a year. We’re so lucky to have committed people doing all the work behind the scenes that makes our Chamber successful.

Next time you have the chance, please thank them for all their good work in 2015, and again for the great things they’ll help us do in 2016!